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Since Donald Trump took office in 2017, the White House has issued several clear anti-LGBTQIA signals and initiatives. Reflecting on Trump's election as U.S. president, many political scientists have analyzed his rise in the context of the literature on American political development (e.g., Skowronek 2017) and comparative governments (e.g., Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Some of this work has received significant media attention and attained a popular readership. The American political development analyses have often focused on the lens of political time and potential party realignment, exploring the possibility of a “disjunctive presidency,” which foretells the demise of the coalition that has enabled the Republican Party to dominate U.S. politics since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Comparative work in the discipline argues that Trump initiatives are threatening to democratic principles, portending a turn toward authoritarianism that parallels the rise of right-wing authoritarian leaders across the globe.

The US government was a late adopter of support and advocacy for international sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) human rights. Although US support for SOGI human rights did not begin in the Obama administration, after 2011 such support was expanded, publicized, and institutionalized. Since the 2016 presidential election, many international and grassroots LGBTQI human rights activists have expressed concern about the prospects for US SOGI advocacy in the Trump administration. No definitive policy changes have been made public, but clues to the future of US advocacy for SOGI can be found in a variety of sites. These include the discourse and policy articulations of the secretary and human rights officials in the State Department as well as those of legislators who fund human rights programs and exercise oversight over it.

Over the last two decades, LGBTQ and reproductive justice advocacy groups have attempted to queer reproductive justice by building coalitions and developing a shared agenda between the new movements. The recent election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States has presented a different set of challenges to this queering process. Through the examination of the political actions and stances taken by the Trump administration as well as the public discourse on identity politics and intersectionality that has emerged in the wake of Trump's election, this article explores what queering reproductive justice looks like in this changed political environment and discusses the implications of Trump's election on the potential for cross-movement coalition building. How does this political moment help us further develop the concept of political intersectionality?

This article cautions against the strong impulse in the #MeToo movement to desexualize politics. Informed by queer theory, the article argues that the public desexualization imperative, represented by indignation toward President Donald Trump's pussy-grabbing antics and the concomitant, albeit justified, movement to expose decades of his sexual harassment of women, casts a shadow across queer citizens that chills sexual expression in democratic discourse and public life. The public desexualization imperative presents a double bind that creates, on one hand, public spaces that are less threatening and discriminatory to women and, on the other, public spaces that—from a queer white cisgender man's perspective, one whose only “marking” is his sexuality—erase queers’ valued differences. The author uses personal narrative to describe and apply tools (conceptualized as fagchild tools) that help navigate tensions between women's equality movements and queer efforts to gain fuller, more open sexual citizenship. The article focuses, first, on softening the body politic (implicitly a white cisgender heterosexual male body) to provide sociopolitical space for sexual pluralism. Second, the article uses the sexualization of House Speaker Paul Ryan to argue that making space for queer sexualities may require accommodating the expression of nonqueer sexualities, including those that most of us find offensive.

Despite campaign promises to be the most “gay-friendly” Republican president, since assuming office, Donald Trump has been proactive in what many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocates call a “rollback” of gains made during the Barack Obama administration, shocking many observers and bringing sexual and gender politics to the fore. How can we make sense of the contradictions and consequences of Trump's sexual and gender politics? I argue that examining the transnational processes of democratization, political homophobia, and homonationalism illuminates the significance of the administration's actions. A democratization approach reveals how Trump's reversal of Obama-era policies and appointment of conservative judges signifies a greater effort at de-democratization through the contraction of citizenship rights and weakening of the judiciary; political homophobia clarifies how the administration legitimizes its governance through opposition to LGBT people and issues with the appointment of openly homophobic and transphobic individuals to prominent positions; and homonationalism, or the entry of certain queer subjects into the nation at the expense of racialized “others,” aptly characterizes forms of queer inclusion still taking place under Trump. For these reasons, putting Trump's sexual and gender politics in transnational perspective can help us better understand this moment in U.S. politics.

Scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics argues that political claims, such as access to the military and marriage, are most effective when representatives from the group articulate that the desire for inclusion and participation in those institutions is similar to the desires held by their straight and nontransgender counterparts. This strategy of assimilation has yielded many positive legal changes. And yet the Donald Trump administration marks a period in which these gains have been repeatedly challenged and particular segments of the LGBTQ group are increasingly under attack. This article offers a preliminary analysis of how LGBTQ politics has been impacted by the 2016 election. Using a historical case study of LGBTQ identity construction and agenda development during the second half of the 1990s, I ask: how might the LGBTQ group mine its recent history for clues to rethink its political agenda and political strategies? Having shown that opportunities to advance a different movement—one focused on more radical, broadly inclusive changes—were bypassed during this period, I conclude by putting forward several recommendations for contemporary LGBTQ movement building and resistance strategies.

Recent years have witnessed a troubling rise in reports of assault, intimidation, and abuse directed at politically active women. The United Nations General Assembly first called for zero tolerance for violence against female candidates and elected officials in Resolution 66/130 in 2011. In 2012, Bolivia became the first country in the world to criminalize political violence and harassment against women, in response to a more than decade-long campaign by locally elected women to document the numerous injuries and abuses they confronted. Resonating across the region, this development led the states-parties to the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women to endorse a Declaration on Political Violence and Harassment against Women in 2015.

Latin America has been at the vanguard in implementing diverse strategies to combat violence against women in politics (VAWIP). In 2012, Bolivia became the first country to criminalize “political violence and harassment against women” with Law 243. Soon, Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, and Mexico followed with similar proposals (Krook and Restrepo Sanín 2016). Despite high levels of criminal impunity (Piscopo 2016), legislative measures have been the preferred strategy to combat VAWIP within the region. The Inter-American Commission on Women (CIM) recently published a model law, drawing on experiences in Bolivia, to serve as inspiration for other legislative measures in the region. What can these legislative definitions tell us about the phenomenon of VAWIP, its limits, and its challenges?

Violence against women is considered a systemic social practice. Aware of the presence of systemic violence “at the horizon of social imagination,” members of some groups, women in this case, learn that they might suffer it any time “simply because they are members of that group” (Young 1990, 62). This understanding encompasses physical attacks as well as humiliation, harassment, intimidation, and stigmatization. Systemic violence targets women because they are women, although they are differently affected and have gendered experiences that are also shaped by race, class, sexuality, generation, and nationality (Collins 2015).

The field of violence against women in politics (VAWIP) is so new, it seems unfair to discuss its “gaps”; rather, the study of VAWIP is defined by its uncharted territory. The bulk of existing literature, compiled by scholars as well as practitioners, emphasizes theoretical conceptualization, empirical forms of violence, and the tracking of incidents across regions (Krook 2017; Krook and Restrepo Sanín 2016). Researchers have stressed the gendered motivations and implications of VAWIP. In short, women are targets of violence because they are women and because they are in politics.

Election violence is an important issue from a number of perspectives. Understanding the causes and consequences of violations of personal integrity is always relevant, but election violence adds a different dimension to this already serious issue: it also violates electoral integrity and decreases democratic quality (Norris 2013). Therefore, election violence should be studied as a simultaneous violation of personal and electoral integrity. In this contribution, I define election violence as occurring when (1) the goal of the act is to affect an electoral outcome or prevent someone from running in an election, and (2) the means by which it is carried out violates the personal integrity of individuals involved in the electoral process.

Violence against women in politics (VAWP) is a human rights violation, as it prevents the realization of political rights. Violence against women in political and public life can be understood as “any act or threat of gender-based violence, resulting in physical, sexual, psychological harm or suffering to women, that prevents them from exercising and realizing their political rights, whether in public or private spaces, including the right to vote and hold public office, to vote in secret and to freely campaign, to associate and assemble, and to enjoy freedom of opinion and expression” (UN Women/UNDP 2017, 20).